Guide user roles overview

Guide supports the following user roles with different Help Center access privileges:

Anonymous user is anybody who visits the Help Center without signing in.

End user is somebody who has created an account and signed in to the Help Center.

Guide Viewer is any regular Zendesk Support agent without Guide Manager privileges. Agents have Guide Viewer privileges by default, but you can make agents Guide Managers as needed.

Light agents (Support Professional add-on and Enterprise add-on) have Guide Viewer privileges for accessing content. Light agents on Guide Lite and Professional cannot create or edit articles. Light agents on Guide Enterprise and Legacy can create and edit articles where agents have permission.

Note: Permission for agents to view and edit knowledge base articles or community posts is not part of the role permissions, but is set the article level for the knowledge base and at the topic level for community (see Setting content viewing and editing access).

Guide Manager has full privileges in Guide. All Administrators have Guide Manager privileges.

Note: Some features listed in the table below require Guide Professional or Enterprise (see the Guide plan comparison.

Permission

Anonymous user

(Anyone)

End-user

(Signed-in users)

Guide Viewer

(Agents)

Guide Manager

(Admins, select agents)

Submit support requests in Help Center

X

(If anybody can submit tickets is enabled)

X

Manage subscriptions and requests

X

Comment on articles and posts

(if enabled)

X

X

X

Add posts to the community

X

X

X

Vote on articles and posts

X (if anonymous voting is enabled)

X

X

X

Subscribe to articles and sections in the KB

X

X

X

Follow posts and topics in the community

X

X

X

HELP CENTER SET UP

Customize the Help Center

X

Manage Help Center settings

X

KB MANAGEMENT

Enable languages for Help Center

X

Add, edit, or delete categories and sections

X

Reorder articles, sections, and categories

X

Edit or delete comments on articles

X

Create a ticket from a comment on a knowledge base article

X

X

COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT

X

Set access restrictions on any community topic

X

Add, edit, or delete community topics

X

Reorder community topics

X

Pin or feature a community post

X

Close a community post for comments

X

Edit or delete comments on a community post

X

Change status of a community post

X

Create a ticket from a community post or comment

X

X

Manage spam

X

Moderate user content

X

Setting content viewing and editing access for agents

Guide Managers have full access to the Help Center, including the ability to view all articles in the Guide admin and the ability to add, edit, and publish all content. These privileges are not part of the Guide Viewer role for agents by default, but are set at the article level for the knowledge base and at the topic level for community.

For the knowledge base, see the following articles to set agent viewing and editing access:

The Submit a Request form in the Help Center is only available for end-users. Because Light Agents are considered Agents in Zendesk, the Help Center form isn't available to them and they're redirected to the agent interface to create their ticket.

Just echoing Joshua Bentley - the content management/discussion refereeing and the site design/admin functions do need to be kept separate. It worries me that to allow our product managers to moderate end-user content I'm going to have to empower them to wipe the whole help centre.

We've just run in to this problem as well. We really need the option to let "agents" moderate content in the community without giving them the "manager" role in Help Center. This is a really major flaw in the default model. It's also unclear to me if the Enterprise plan with granular permissions would even fix this.

Thanks for the feedback, and trust me, we hear you on the challenges that limitation poses in managing the Community. It's not fixed by the Enterprise plan; management levels simply weren't baked in to the Community platform when it was built.

Could it be that there was a change in the permissions of the light agents just very recently (the last hours, days)?

I am doing research and calculations and just thought that I have seen not long time ago that a light agent is able to add/edit Guide articles.

<<Light agents (Professional add-on and Enterprise add-on) have Guide Viewer privileges for accessing content, but they cannot add, edit, or delete articles where agents have permission and they cannot be Guide Managers.>>

Sorry for the late reply here... But I'm realizing that we need to update the translations for this article. The change for Light agents is not reflected yet in the translations. I'll add it to our next loc update.

This has really impacted our organization in a negative way. Our light agents (which include our product managers who monitor tickets but don't handle them) have typically managed our Help Center content - they don't handle Q&A but they post updates to our product information. Is there any way to re-enable their access as a Light Agent?

Thanks for letting us know of the impact you're running into here. By default, light agents do not have permissions to manage help center content as noted here on our light agent permissions article. However, as you are currently using Guide legacy, the light agents on your account should have the permission to edit and comment on guide articles etc.

I'm going to create a ticket so we can discuss this further from there in regards to your account. I'll see you in the ticket. :)

Additionally, I thought we had it so our users had a seamless experience (ie, one login for our site, help desk, and what we call our forum -- ie, guide) -

So, if they are logged into the site they are logged into the guide, just like our admin accounts. The site just went live and when on my phone I noticed guide wanted me to login although I was logged into the site. Not sure if something got messed up or ...

We're finding the Guide Pricing structure regarding user roles extremely frustrating. We have 10-12 Support agents and 1-2 separate people that manage the Help Center content. The only interaction that our Support agents have with the Help Center is linking the article in their ticket responses, while the Help Center managers are writing, editing, publishing, organizing, and designing. But since the Guide pricing is tied to the number of Support Agents, to get our Help Center managers the tools they need to do their job, we would have to pay for 10-12 unused accounts worth of access to the same tools. Have there been any thoughts on making the subscriptions between Guide and Support more customizable and useful for the needs of a Support team?

Hi - just echoing the same thing as Cody & Colm as well - it would be nice if licensing could be separated. Let me know if there's somewhere more constructive to provide that feedback, if there's a feature request I could vote on etc.

I did some digging through our forums here and it doesn't look like we have a feedback post related to this yet! I would recommend creating a post in our Guide Product Feedback Forum along with your use case as it looks like there's others that would also be interested.

We have one customer that should see specific categories, sections, and articles that are hidden from everyone else. That's working fine for us. However, we want that same customer to NOT see certain other categories, sections, and articles, while all other users do.

To further complicate the situation, we do not require login in our help center--that one customer gets the filtered view when they log in, but we don't require it.

Is there a way to use the if/else and isnt language on the category pages to hide specific content from a user group?

User segments are the only functionality that control content visibility. You'll need to create a segment for that specific customer and limit the visibility of those categories, sections, and articles to just that user segment. This will render those invisible to everyone else. However, that customer will need to log in to see them, as the system cannot recognize whether they're part of the segment or not unless they authenticate.

They would still be able to access any other public parts of the Help Center without logging in, but if they want to see the content that's only visible to them, log in would be required.